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In The Media, Ideology Trumps The Truth

My friend, Brian, operates the Frankenstein Government blog. His tag line is quote from George Orwell’s classic book, 1984:

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

It was while reading an article at Western Journalism on the subject of Bowe Bergdahl that Brian’s tag line came to mind.

Bergdahl, you will recall, is a soldier who disappeared from his post in Afghanistan five years ago and became a prisoner of the Taliban until President Obama traded five Guantanamo prisoners to get him back. There has been more than a little controversy over whether Bergdahl is a hero, as President Obama treated him, or whether he was a deserter, as some of his platoon members claim. This is a story that for some reason has not caught my interest. The Western Journalism article is the first I’ve read on the subject and I am still not particularly interested in the story. This article relates how six of Bergdahl’s platoon want to set the record straight by publish a book with their version of the truth and problems they are having with some publishers:

“Conservatives are all over Bergdahl and using it against Obama,” said Atria Books senior editor Sarah Durand.

She expressed her “concern” that the exposé might affect Obama in the same way the ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ group damaged John Kerry’s credibility a decade ago.

But, it was what Bergdahl’s team leader had to say about the above quote that brought Brian’s tag line to mind:

“There was no way we were going to sit down and be quiet while Obama was calling him a war hero,” he noted. “We’re just trying to tell the truth. It’s not my fault this would make Obama look bad.” _ (Emphasis added)

Heaven forbid that the truth would make President Obama look bad. But, that is the mentality of the media in America these days; ideology is more important than the truth. Think about it. Whistle blowers get punished and the media is silent, scandals get covered-up and the media is silent, black on white crime is ignored but white on black crime dominates the news, facts come out contrary to the global warming theory and the information is either ignored or the sources are denigrated for being “climate deniers”, foreign policy SNAFUS are ignored when a Democrat is in the White House, the environmental radicals in the EPA are allowed to cripple our economy at will without any alarms being set off by the media, and the list goes on and on.

I don’t blame the politicians for the sad state in which we find our country. The political animal has not changed in thousands of years. Lying is the nature of the political beast. I blame the media for not exposing the public to the truth of what their government is doing. Getting the truth out in the open has become a revolutionary act.

I’ve been studying a similar phenomena in media reporting about climate change. Everything we read or hear from the media predicts gloom and doom unless we spend trillions to reduce CO2 emissions NOW!

There is a concerted and coordinated effort, probably funded by those with huge financial interests in clean energy technologies – like Tom Steyer – to push the concept of human-caused global warming alarmism.

They all share similar characteristics:
1 – Most are journalists or include journalist
2 – All boast media connections
3 – All feed alarmist news article to global media outlets
4 – All provide “denier” debunking services
5 – Most have hit teams that respond immediately to any skeptic reporting
6 – All attack the skeptics themselves, more so than the science they report

It’s hard for truth to compete with an organized media campaign of misinformation.

Fortunately, science doesn’t read newspapers. The truth is out there. With each passing day mundane data collection is disproving the vested AGW theory.